


Hollow Bones Can't Hold You Up

by TheColorBlue



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Post-Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-14 21:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Looking back on being a Nobody was <i>really</i> realizing what it was like to be only half alive; these days, Lea pretty much lets himself feel whatever he goddamn well pleases, and also there is Roxas.</p><p>Bonus Short added: "Surprise Party"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic will probably have canon inaccuracies, as I haven’t played any of the KH games since KH2, and that was several years ago… The material for this fic comes from reading up KH wiki entries and watching youtube videos.

Looking back on the entire experience of being Nobody was like looking back and realizing, _really_ appreciating, the fact that you had spent the last several years adversely affected by some kind of horrible drug. Or that part of your brain had been removed (well, your Heart, in this case) and you really had been stomping around with only half your faculties intact. Or that you had just woken up from years of a deep, clinical depression, all the lethargy and lack of interest in the world, only there wasn’t lethargy, you had plenty of energy—too much energy—and so you felt your own numbness all the more acutely; only it wasn’t a feeling in your head, or your heart, it was entirely physical. Nobodies might have lost their Hearts, but they still had their Bodies, and the chemical reactions inside of it were magnified. You still felt tension tight in your muscles and in your bones. You still felt your flesh and blood heart racing. There was a weird kind of physical pain that wasn’t physical pain, that put you on edge at all times, both coldness and heat and numbness and a subtle horror that seemed to have driven most of the Organization to a brutal cruelty towards the rest of the world. 

Pretty much when Lea approached the rest of the former Organization in current residence at the Radiant Gardens, they didn’t want to talk about what they remembered. You got your Heart back and then you realized exactly what it was that you had been living through, and all of the unforgiveable things you had done while living it. You got your Heart back, and then it seemed funny how they had clung to life as Nobodies. Funny as in tragic. Somehow, there had always been a terrible fear—maybe instincts at their most base, some kind of clawing feeling that resided in the molecules of your being, and not as the elevated kind of emotion that you could articulate and work through and live past. Nobodies had always _felt_ something, but it would be going into the different variations of how you could use the word “feel” and if crawling around with a black emptiness in your chest could be called feeling something. 

Lea didn’t really like looking back on it either. 

Instead, he looked forward. 

He breathed in the fresh air.

He relished being _alive_. 

Honestly: he was happy that when he looked in the mirror, these days, there was something subtly changed, and other things that weren’t so subtle. He had color in his cheeks. Those weird tattoos were gone; he wasn’t even sure why he as a Nobody had thought they looked any good, honestly. 

Then he would think: _He was happy_.

Good god. 

He wouldn’t do a dance then, but sometimes it was a near thing. 

Strange, the things that a person appreciated these days. 

\---

Funny too, about the names you went around with. 

He kept correcting everybody, Riku and the motley crew from Mickey’s kingdom, but it could be like talking to brick walls. 

Axel sounded like the name of a pretentious shit. He was Lea, goddamnit, _Lea_.

Got that _memorized?_

\---

The first time that Lea got to meet with Roxas again, as himself, they were still over at Yen Sid’s tower in the middle of nowhere. Riku was out training to be some kind of great Keyblade Master. Donald and Goofy and Mickey were outside getting into a mess of trying to hang up lines of laundry—even heroes had to do laundry every once in a while—and Yen Sid was yelling at Mickey to not try anything funny with the brooms again, _remember the last time_ \--

And Lea was sitting inside by the window, drinking tea and feeling like the smuggest bastard, the way you could feel sometimes when watching other people struggle in a hapless, comical way. 

Sora, meanwhile, had been trying to get through a history reading assignment that Yen Sid was making him do. After a few more minutes of watching laundry fly everywhere downstairs, Lea looked over towards Sora to make some kind of witty remark, and he found that Sora wasn’t there at all. The light was kind of shimmering. It was Sora and it wasn’t Sora who was looking at him cautiously over the top of a book the size of a dictionary. Sora didn’t have that kind of blonde hair. 

Lea put down the tea and stalked over. He knocked the book out of Roxas’s hands in a dramatic way. Then he grabbed Roxas. He hugged Roxas good and hard, and he didn’t let him go, even when Roxas struggled a little, but then Roxas wasn’t struggling. He was hugging Lea back. Lea might have been blubbering a little, and if you had said anything about that, Lea would have knocked you flat on your ass. The funny thing about emotions was how much Lea appreciated them these days. You went through so many years of life not being able to feel any emotion properly, and then once they came back, you pretty much said to hell with it and let yourself feel anything you damn well pleased. 

“You should have some cake,” Lea said. Roxas was still crushed to his chest. “We need to fatten you up, you’re barely here, aren’t you.” 

Roxas laughed a little, the sound muffled in Lea’s coat, but it was kind of true. Kind of. Lea’s hands kept passing through what should have been stray strands of blonde hair but was only bits of projected light, after all. Lea sort of stepped back then, a bit, and squeezed Roxas’s cheeks gently. Yeah, he couldn’t tell if he was pinching a Sora or a Roxas, physically speaking, and what with the way the light was shimmering like that: it was hard to say it one way or another. Then Roxas was putting Lea’s hands down, and he said, “No, I’m really here.” He repeated it, like saying it would make it even truer than it already was. “I’m _really_ here.” 

Lea laughed at that, wetly, he was going to start blubbering up like a baby, and he went to dig up Yen Sid’s most expensive, valuable tea to put into the pot. Roxas was going to get the welcome back tea party _of his life_.

\---

It was a funny thing: Roxas and Sora sharing a body. Roxas really looked happy too, saying something about how Sora actually was a genuinely good person—which was lucky, because otherwise maybe he’d be secretly wishing that he could _beat the other guy up_ , every day. 

“You know that he told me that I deserved to be my own person, as much as he did?” Roxas asked. “How many people do you know would even say something like that? After everything that DIZ did, and the Organization did?”

It was late. All the other folks were snug in their beds like bedbugs, but Lea had dragged Roxas out for continued catching-up-times. They had climbed up onto the roof of Yen Sid’s tower and were watching the nighttime stars. 

“Sora’s lucky he’s one hell of a pure-as-the-driven-snow hero,” Lea remarked pleasantly. “Or you’re right, I’d probably want to beat him up myself too.” 

Roxas was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Sora says thanks, and that he appreciates it.” 

Lea reached over to muss up their hair. “You two are so goddamn cute I could bundle you up and whisk you away to Neverland,” Lea cooed. 

Roxas was quiet for another moment, and then said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Okay,” Lea said easily. 

They lay together on the roof for another hour and watched the twinkling lights of the faraway stars.


	2. Bonus Short: "Surprise Party"

Sora kept trying to emphasize that this was less a surprise birthday party for Roxas—given that none of them knew Roxas’s birthday, per say—and more of a surprise “We Appreciate and Celebrate Your Being With Us Today” type –day. 

There was a large and fluffy coconut cream cake and pineapple gelatin desserts cut into the shapes of stars and rockets. Roxas squinted at this picnic display, and then said, out aloud, “Sora, I see that you’ve been trying too hard.” 

Lea slapped Roxas on the back so hard that he could have tipped into the cake face-first if his reflexes weren’t better than they were. “Sora put in exactly the right amount of effort,” Lea said. “Which, to be honest, wasn’t much. He wanted to keep it a secret from you, to surprise you, so the rest of us pretty much did all the heavy-lifting while he turned around and didn’t look.”

The day was also Sora’s birthday. There were two large candles stuck into the cake, both molded in the shape of stars, and one colored red and black, the other black and white. Lea set them on fire by touching his fingers to the wicks.

“Bang, bang,” he said. 

They were up in the tree house of the kids’ play island. 

“Don’t set the house on fire,” Riku said, frowning at him. 

Lea cocked his hand at Riku and said again, with a wink, “ _Bang._ ”

Through the open door of the tree house, there was a beautiful view of the ocean and of the mainland. 

“We’re dropping you in the ocean, after this,” Lea said to Roxas. “It’s the island tradition, dontcha know.”

“ _Lea_ ,” Roxas said. 

Kairi—or was it Namine?—giggled, telling Lea to "behave yourself, or you'll get the smallest slice of cake," and then she started to plate the gelatin desserts.


End file.
